army colonel douglas macgregor. and it's not just enormous gadgets the military spending money on as obama announces this drawdown of troops a massive military buildup is in the works thousands of u.s. troops now gearing up to go to israel the military is calling it an exercise not a deployment but this is one serious exercise this is israel says they're ready to go to war with iran so what's really going on here i spoke to jamal earlier to answer just that. what is happening on its face is that the u.s. is working to reassure israel working to reassure saudi arabia and the gulf states that. we have their backs that we have the security blanket in the region and that they don't have to worry about iran as a threat. but. as we can see we're getting closer and closer to war with iran. anybody who argues that this kind of extraordinary confluence of events of events. planned exercises by the u.s. and israel to exercise that iran was doing in the in the persian gulf they would argue that those aren't sort of part of the

army colonel douglas macgregor i asked him if this is money well spent. no i don't think so. the real question for the american taxpayer is are you getting something better a dramatic leap ahead in capability than what you normally would get with a traditional carrier and the answer is really no it's very expensive we've invested in some new technologies such as the electromagnetic air left aircraft lift system which is designed to replace the catapult it's troubled we've got problems with it's not working properly they'll eventually work through that but the question is do we really need it what does it do for a city that we don't already get from an existing carrier and they can the question is not much when you're spending billions and billions of dollars in addition to what you'd normally spend you expect a dramatic leap ahead we don't get that with the f. thirty five either which is designed to be launched from these carriers and most of the things that people point to any f. thirty five have to do with the intelligence recognizance surveillance suite the radars all of t